Recovering The Future
A year after the tsunami in Japan, Argentinian photographer Alejandro Chaskielberg started a collaboration with people from the fishing village of Otsuchi.
One of the images in Alejandro Chaskielberg’s book Otsuchi Future Memories shows the village as seen from a hill nearby. From that same perspective in March 2011, people who had managed to get to safety watched the town being swept away in a matter of minutes by waves that reached 10 km inland. Otsuchi was probably the hardest hit location during the tsunami. About 10% of the population died, and survivors found themselves trying to recreate a life in a place that looked like nothing they had seen before.
Alejandro Chaskielberg helped digitize part of the photographs that were saved from the waters and collaborated with locals to portray them where their homes and workplaces once stood. He then colorized the black and white portraits using tones sampled from the photographs saved from the tsunami, in the attempt to connect the before and after in people’s experience and open a path to the future.
Otsuchi Future Memories is published by
RM and available for the price of 45€. The series is currently exhibited in Al Ula, Saudi Arabia as part of
Past Forward a selection of installations chosen for a partnership between the town and Cortona On The Move Festival.
